Little mercy in this sister act

A film based on nuns' abuse of "fallen girls" in the past angered the Vatican, writes Garry Maddox.

Filmmaker Peter Mullan has called it "one of the great injustices of the second half of the 20th century".

In an echo of the Aboriginal reconciliation debate in Australia, he has called for an official apology and even wants financial compensation for survivors.

But the Scottish writer, director and actor's most powerful contribution has been to reveal the monstrous treatment of "fallen" girls by an order of Catholic nuns in The Magdalene Sisters.

The harrowing film, which follows three girls taken in by the Sisters of Mercy for "shaming" their families, dramatises the fate of 30,000 inmates who passed through the Magdalene commercial laundries. One is pregnant, another has been raped by her cousin and the third is a flirtatious virgin.

Played by unknowns Dorothy Duffy, Anne-Marie Duff and Nora-Jane Noone, they are physically and psychologically abused as they scrub away their sins. While the film is set in Ireland in the 1960s, the last Magdalene laundry remained in that country until 1996. They also operated in other countries, including Australia from the '50s to the '70s. There was a famous old slogan here: "Bad girls do the best sheets".");document.write("

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When The Magdalene Sisters won the main prize at the Venice Film Festival last September, there was an unholy outcry.

Vatican radio said the film was "clearly false" and that awarding it the Golden Lion was "offensive" and "pathetic".

The Vatican's Cardinal Ersilio Tonini was also bitter: "This isn't a truthful portrayal of the church and its director has made libellous statements against Catholics."

Mullan, best known for his Cannes prize-winning role as an alcoholic in Ken Loach's My Name is Joe, found himself in the middle of a religious storm.

"The church in Italy went ballistic," he says in a Scottish accent as thick as porridge. "They condemned it wholesale."

But the subsequent reaction showed how a powerful film can contribute to an emotional social debate. When The Magdalene Sisters was becoming a hit in Ireland, Mullan says the church was "curiously very quiet" about it. By the time the film opened in the UK, also doing well, the head of the Catholic Church in Scotland was recommending that everyone see it.

Mullan sees this as a major shift in how the church approached the issue, at least at a public relations level.

"I'm hoping - and we've got a long way to go - that this is the beginning of the church changing tack politically to say 'we accept that this is a reasoned account of what went on'."

The church should offer a sincere apology to those women brutalised in the laundries, Mullan says.

"I believe they are completely entitled to financial compensation of a substantial scale. But they're looking to make peace with their God because they're all of a certain age. So I'm hoping that the church has moved towards a meaningful apology and a meaningful reconciliation."

The filmmaker is often asked about his religion since the stormy debut in Venice.

"The first thing that was said to me was 'I take it you're not a Catholic', which really gave me a laugh. I said 'Unfortunately guys, I am a Catholic. You'd have to be a Catholic to make this film.

"They were really shocked. They had this idea that Scotland is a Protestant country. And they would say things like 'obviously you're not a practising Catholic'."

Mullan's response was that nobody ever asks whether Jews or Muslims are practising.

"You're a Catholic, I'm afraid. They've got you for the first 18 years of your life. You can be a recovering Catholic or whatever you want to call yourself.

"But the bottom line is that's what you are."

As well as another major award - the critics' prize at the Toronto Film Festival - more controversy has followed.

When Miramax bought The Magdalene Sisters for American release, scheduled for later this year, the largest Catholic lay organisation in America, the Catholic League, demanded that Disney sever its ties with the company because of a continuing bias against the religion.

A league spokesman said: "What is the purpose of maligning nuns, most of whom gave of themselves selflessly to care for and empower these women - women whom society had cast as pariahs?"

Mullan wrote the screenplay after seeing the treatment of the Magdalene girls in the documentary Sex in a Cold Climate.

While the three main characters are fictional, he insists all the incidents in the film are based on real stories. "The film is a digestible version of it. The reality was much worse."

An American woman reported daily sexual abuse, an Irish woman recalled even more violent discipline and a man told how he would take three different girls every week to be sexually abused by an archbishop. He would also supply basic items like sanitary towels to girls in return for sexual favours.

"I wasn't going to put anything in whereby the church could say 'that's a very serious accusation, you'd better be able to prove it'. And for me to say 'well, I can't' then they could discredit the whole film," Mullan says.

Even now, Mullan is shocked almost daily by the letters he gets from survivors. "I would have liked to have thought that it was just an unpleasant blip in world history. Then you suddenly realise as people get in touch with you that it wasn't just a blip, it was quite systematic. Even more systematic than the film implies."

Making the film made him question his own religious values. While wedded to the "nice" side of Catholicism that grew out of watching Bing Crosby and Spencer Tracy being streetwise in a dog collar at the cinema, Mullan has realised he now disagrees with "about 98 per cent of what the church advocates". And he is still pushing for that apology.